here really are some anti-gun
lobbyists (including
Sarah Brady) who do not want to take away every single gun in the
United States. In their utopia, they can accept people owning guns for
sporting purposes. Does this mean that gun-rights groups should relax,
and go along with the anti-gun lobbies' proposals for more "moderate"
controls?

Not exactly. Because when you examine what even the moderates in the
anti-gun movement want, their wish list of restrictions looks pretty
extreme.

One of the longest-held objectives of the anti-gun lobby is a ban on
so-called "Saturday Night Specials."

Exactly what these folks consider a "Saturday Night Special" is pretty
elastic. During the 1970s, the anti-gun lobby backed congressional
legislation that would have outlawed two-thirds of all handguns by
calling them "Saturday Night Specials." In other words, most medium to
small handguns would be banned.

Handgun Control, Inc.'s "Brady II" bill would ban as a "Saturday Night
Special" any gun whose barrel and grip combined did not measure more
than 10 inches.

At
this point, the anti-gun lobbies diverge. The Coalition to Stop Gun
Violence (formerly the National Coalition to Ban Handguns) would call
for outlawing all other handguns, except for the police and military
(since the government, unlike ordinary people, can be trusted with
dangerous weapons).

Handgun Control, Inc., the larger and more powerful lobby, would not
(under its present leadership by Sarah Brady) call for banning all of
the large handguns that would still be available for sale.

Many large handguns would, however, face prohibition by being labeled
"assault weapons." Based on congressional legislation that HCI has
supported, an unelected federal bureaucrat would have the unilateral
authority to outlaw any and every self-loading firearm including
rifles, shotguns, and pistols. (The 1994 federal "assault weapon" ban
does not go so far.)

At
HCI's urging, New Jersey Governor James Florio successfully pushed for
legislation that outlawed many .22 and CO2 pellet guns as "assault
weapons." (The pellet gun ban was thrown out by a federal court, based
on a federal law that forbids states and cities to outlaw air guns.)

Besides banning most medium to small handguns, and many self-loading guns, the anti-gun lobbies have also tried to prohibit
the Glock pistol, supposedly an "undetectable plastic gun." One lobby
even called it a "Hijackers Special" that was "tailor-made for
terrorism." The large numbers of police officers who carry the Glock
would probably disagree.

Besides "bad" guns, ammunition for "bad" guns is also on the
prohibition agenda. Former Senator Pat Moynihan (D-NY) got a great
deal of support, in certain quarters, to get rid of all ammunition in
.25, .32, and 9mm caliber models. Moynihan eventually offered a
"compromise" of proposing an immense punitive tax on politically
incorrect calibers of ammunition, rather than banning them entirely.

In
lobbying for gun bans, the anti-gun lobbies have supported legislation
such as New Jersey's and New York City's, which have no "grand
fathering" to allow current owners of the newly illegal guns to
continue to posses them. These laws require owners to turn their guns
over to the government for no compensation; recalcitrant gun owners
are subject to severe jail or prison sentences.

Once all anti-gun lobbies' current prohibition initiatives are
exhausted, there would still be many guns theoretically available for
possession. Large caliber, expensive revolvers (and perhaps a few
semiautomatic pistols) would still be permitted (at least under the
HCI scenario). So would most rifles and shotguns which required manual
re-chambering.

At
that point, some of the folks in charge of the present anti-gun
lobbies would probably want to call it quits on gun banning.

The lobbies would, however, still favor further controls on all the
remaining guns: All firearms would be registered. Issuance of a
license to possess any type of gun would be within the broad
discretion of local police administration. Possession of a gun would
require a mandatory safety course, a waiting period, a background
check for as long as it took for the police administration to satisfy
itself about you, and, of course, a hefty fee paid by gun buyers to
support all this bureaucracy. Private gun transfers would be illegal.

Under Mrs. Brady's "needs-based licensing," the police would give gun
permits to people who wanted guns for "sporting" purposes, but not to
people who wanted guns for protection. Possession of a gun in a home
would be allowed only if the gun were so "securely" stored that it
would be impossible to use in an emergency. When guns were
accidentally misused, or stolen and used by criminals, the owner of
the gun would be subject to lawsuits and to criminal penalties.

Carrying any kind of gun for defense would be illegal without a
license; a license would be impossible for ordinary citizens to
obtain; and persons who carried without a license would spend a
mandatory year in prison.

The mandatory sentence against carrying without a license would be
modeled on Massachusetts' Bartley-Fox law, which was the first of its
kind in the nation. The first prosecution under Bartley-Fox was of an
old woman who was passing out religious literature in a rough part of
Boston.

Under such a law, it will still be possible to buy one or two guns
over the course of one's life, and use them for sports. Persons
willing to navigate through a bureaucratic maze could generally own
guns that the anti-gun lobbyists consider "particularly suitable for
sporting purposes."

The folks with the best chances of obtaining guns under the
"reasonable" controls supported by the anti-gun lobbies would be
wealthy, well-educated people, since they would have the resources to
slog their way through all the paperwork, fees, and hassle.

A
necessary consequence of anti-gun lobbies' success would be that the
number of gun owners would drop dramatically. Currently, about one in
two households possesses a gun. That number would be decimated, as gun
ownership was restricted to highly motivated sportsmen willing to
stumble their way through an administrative labyrinth.

With the above strict federal legislation as a baseline, states and
cites would be free to add further restrictions. The preemption laws
in most states which forbid cities and counties from enacting gun
prohibitions would be repealed.

Cities would be free to enact laws like Washington, D.C.'s handgun
ban. When the D.C. law is criticized for contributing to the high
crime rate there, HCI defends the prohibition, and says that the
problem is caused by other areas which have not enacted sufficiently
severe laws.

Even if all the gun controls actually did work, and gun crime almost
disappeared, the anti-gun lobbies would probably not abandon their
campaigns. These campaigns have little do with actual use of guns in
crime. After all, so-called "assault weapons" are used in about 1% of
gun crimes, yet the lobbies run fraudulent public-relations campaigns
asserting that "assault weapons" are the weapon of choice among
criminals.

As
long as any guns exist, there will be, at least occasionally, infamous
crimes committed with guns. Accordingly, there will always be fertile
fund-raising and media opportunities for anti-gun lobbyists
specializing in the manufacture of hysteria.

While the current leadership of the anti-gun lobbies might not favor
actually prohibiting and confiscating every single gun, their
successors might feel differently. After all, when all the "moderate"
controls are achieved, and they fail to reduce gun crime, the logic
for total prohibition will seem inescapable.

In
Britain, 80 years of severe gun controls have nearly obliterated the
ranks of gun owners. Yet, while gun crime is relatively low in Britain
(and was even lower before the gun controls were enacted), occasional
gun crimes furnish a pretext for an outcry for the abolition of all
guns. Britain began this century with widespread civilian gun
ownership, no gun controls, and virtually no gun crime. Britain will
have ended the century with the tiny ranks of gun owners just a step
away from full prohibition.

The British gun owners got themselves in their predicament by
accepting more and more "moderate" proposals for control. The sum of
these "moderate" proposals made gun ownership difficult for most
people, and has left the remaining gun owners with too small a mass to
be a strong political force. Will American gun owners follow the same
road to self-destruction in coming decades by accepting the "moderate"
proposals of the anti-gun lobbies?

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